Saturday, July 31, 2010

Last year, AMC offered a fun web app called MadMen Yourself on the show's website, allowing fans to create avatars of themselves in the style of the show. I made one of myself, featuring a hat and two things I'm likely to carry: a newspaper and a coffee:

With a new season, the app gets an upgrade. More options and backgrounds, and more clothes to pick from ... still within the Sinatra-era look and feel. Tennis whites, even.

Monday, July 26, 2010

My grandfather was a keen observer of the weather, and during my visits with him, Skipper (as we all called him) had a chestnut or two to share. As I recall, he was the first person to explain to me why a pretty red sunset was great news … especially for a trouting enthusiast like himself.

Sailor’s delight at night, sailor’s warning in the morning … those are the things we learn about red skies as kids. But there’s a lot more than that, you know.

A weather synopsis that’s worth saving is just the start of this week’s web tour. We’ll also keep you posted with a local eye on the World Cup, pour up some laughs from one of the best comedy troupes in the world, and dish some politics from the right side of the political pew.

How to forecast weather without gadgets I downloaded this oversize graphic after thoroughly enjoying the clever way it presented a trove of common-sense information about weather and how we can observe the world around us. Did you ever think it was folk wisdom, for instance, that you could smell a rainstorm in advance? Well, actually, you sort of can; plants release waste when a low-pressure system moves in, meaning that that earthy smell is a sign to take in the laundry.

Andrew Brown One of the young reporters working with me at the CBC newsroom these days is Andrew Brown (you may remember his dad, Jim Brown, from his years hosting the Morning Show). Andrew is also writing a blog on the World Cup for our sports colleagues. Andrew has been having, from the looks of it, quite the slice keeping track of each day’s action, as seen through the lens of St. John’s fans. The link above is for Andrew’s Twitter feed, which features blog links and more.

Vuvuzela appSpeaking of soccer … No doubt the vuvuzela, the contentious instrument that makes a buzzing racket, will be a key memory (good or bad) from this World Cup. Why limit your exposure to just the games? This Dutch company has made a wildly popular – more than 1 million downloads, if you’re curious – app for the iPhone that lets you blare away, whenever you want. Surely this could bring a whole new element to staff meetings, no?

Gulf oil spill mapI wanted to draw your attention to this interactive map prepared by the U.S. Environmental Response Management Association, which shows the area in the Gulf of Mexico involving the massive Deepwater Horizon spill. Using overlays of data, you can select from many facets, from the infrastructure of the oil industry to the flora and fauna of the area, to industries like the fishery. It’s a great way to get insight into one of the biggest, most complex stories of our time.

UCBcomedy.comUCB comes from Upright Citizens Brigade, a comedy troupe that launched Amy Poehler and other funny folks to stardom. The current batch are funny enough; I and many others (a couple of million, actually) have had a jolly good laugh at their take on the BP disaster, which depicted executives at a loss as to respond to a coffee spill. There’s more where that came from.

RicochetFor several years, I’ve enjoyed a short, bright podcast called Martini Shot, written and read by Rob Long, a writer who made his bones on the sitcom Cheers. It’s largely about the entertainment industry. While he writes it for the U.S. public radio station KCRW, don’t assume Long fits the Volvo-Democrat-organic stereotype; he’s also well-known for his conservative punditry. Ricochet is a project he’s backing, aimed at centre-right voters. (That is, voters who are way to the right of Barack Obama, but not at all comfortable with the Palin brigade.)

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Several times over the last few months, I’ve received a few messages from friends or readers looking for a few tips about blogging. Two were wondering about launching a blog, while another was at that edgy area, where he’s been wondering about packing it in.

Blogs may not have the novelty or trendy appeal that they did six or seven years ago, but they’re more popular than ever. But it’s hardly unusual to find a once-active blog has gone dormant, or a blogger is stepping back from the fray. Why? There are several reasons, but as with other hobbies, I imagine that the fire just dwindles away.

This seems to be the case with one of my blogging friends. My advice was simple: take a breath, dial back your expectations, and park a note on the blog that you’re on break for a little while. I happen to like his blog a lot, and completely out of self-interest I’d like to see him keep it going. My pitch was this: you don’t need to post frequently, and that I’d rather read a good post once a week than nothing at all.

Many bloggers, of course, post far more often that once a week when they get started. It’s only natural: you’ve got something to say, it’s all new and exciting, and you’re clipping on the buzz of doing something new and exciting. But like a caffeine rush, it doesn’t last. Quite often, those blogs collapse or tumble into a virtual graveyard.

So, that may not be the most optimistic way to describe blogging culture, but it does bring a layer of reality to things. I’ve been publishing my own blog for six years, and I’ve enjoyed it because I make sure it doesn’t feel like work. I make a small commitment of time through the week, and although it’s an obligation to keep it updated, I never want to feel like it’s a chore.

I wasn’t surprised to read in the most recent Technorati survey of the blogosphere that the most important thing that most bloggers gain from their sites is personal satisfaction. There are other reasons, of course, like networking, promotion, professional development and money. [On that last point, you may be curious to learn, though, that very few corporations use blogs as a revenue generator, as opposed to 40 per cent of part-time bloggers, who obviously have excessively optimistic expectations of the traffic they’re going to land.]

So, here are some tips I’d give to anyone thinking about a blog:

Pick a tone, and have something to say. In other words, what do you want your blog to look like? What do you want it to achieve?

Pace yourself. Don’t knock yourself out, but don’t let your blog be stagnant, either. (A blogging platform that lets you pre-program posts is a great idea.) Don’t worry about getting it right, right out of the gate. Your blog’s personality will evolve as you move along.

Don’t obsess over traffic, especially if your numbers fall or slip. Learn how Facebook, Twitter, Feedburner and other applications can help you develop an audience. Send emails to friends to generate a base audience.

Have fun. If you’re not enjoying it, and you’re not being paid to do it, you’re going to have a really hard time keeping a blog going.

Elsewhere this week

Huge URL Twitter and other social media apps have given rise to various apps that make it easy to contract a huge URL, or web address, into a tiny one. Huge URL is a great joke for our character-counting age. Try it and you’ll see why!

Party Cat If you’ve ever had a pet cat, and I’ve had a good few through the years, you know they keep their own schedules. More than that, they expect you to do the same. And, more than that, you have to wonder about what they do when you’re not around. Those thoughts come to mind when I see this hilarious set of comics, about a puddy tat that knows how to get its party on.

I haven't been posting much here, at least according to my usual pace ... but I've been busy nonetheless, and part of my work has involved what I think of as my other blog.

I've revived What Odds, a blog I'm running as part of my job at CBC News in St. John's.

The idea is this: there's plenty that we come across in the newsroom that doesn't (or shouldn't) fit in a conventional news story, but are all the same worth passing along. It's also a means to let our audience know about programming, catch up on a show they may have missed, learn about what's coming up, take part in our daily polls, and have a few laughs.

A few weeks ago, I parted with £75 (or about Cdn $120, I think) for a subscription to Monocle, the British-based magazine that comes out about 10 times a year. It costs about as much to buy it here in St. John's, but I figure this way I'll get in closer to when it comes out. It's an unusual magazine, that covers industries as diverse as retail fashion and defence contracting, and while parts of it leave me cold, I find myself reading it deeply for an hour or so at a time.

Usually, the attraction of getting a subscription is that you can get a bargoon, often a small fraction of newsstand price.

Monocle doesn't go down that route, and in fact seems to boast that it charges you what it costs to make it. (The magazine is a favourite with a lot of designers because it uses multiple paper stocks, and put a lot of emphasis on its stylish presentation ... not to mention a dead-serious attention to the design industry itself in its reporting.)

This is all well and good, but there's been a brutal worldwide recession, and Monocle - which depends on advertising from the luxury brands it often covers - would seem to be in trouble, like practically every other magazine.

But that doesn't appear to be the case.

Here's a bit from a recent piece in Bloomberg's BusinessWeek about the magazine and its Canadian-born founder and editor-in-chief, TylerBrûlé, he of the extra accents (his father didn't use either of the accents in Brule).

The latest edition of Monocle is a fat book of a magazine
that challenges just about every piece of received wisdom about what
works in media these days, starting with the notion that this is no time
to start a new print publication. Now three years old, Monocle
boasts a global circulation nearing 150,000, a 35 percent annual
increase at a time when magazine sales are supposed to be going in the
other direction, and a rising subscription base of 16,000. If that
sounds small, consider that these individuals pay $150 for 10 issues, a
50 percent premium over the newsstand price.

Monocle has launched an interesting spinoff this summer: a newspaper, another product known for its declining and thinning ranks worldwide. There's only one edition, and it's being marketed at the Mediterranean summer crowd, or, as likely, those who wish they were among that number. I haven't seen or felt, the issue, and I use the word "felt" because Monocle decided to use a type of paper stock that is far more pliable and longlasting than conventional newsprint. It's also, by necessity, more expensive.

There you have it: the newspaper as luxury good. I happen to think there's some logic in that concept, incidentally, for all newspapers, even though I would propose a different tact that what Monocle is doing this summer. Rather than trying, often in vain, to herd in would-be readers that will never buy the product, or produce giveaway products that simply go straight to recycling (if that), publishers should consider tailoring their product to the audience that will stick with the published word and will pay what's required for it.

Anyway, I'll be going back to my latest Monocle later today, to pick up where I left off on a thought-provoking piece on making cities more human-sized and inviting. I don't like everything in and about Monocle, and I stick by a column I wrote last fall on Brûlé's foolish thinking on social media, but for what I'm paying for it - and for book-quality pieces on such a wide range of issues - it's a good deal indeed.

Monday, July 19, 2010

This is the TeeFury shirt of the day, on sale until late tonight. I'm ordering one... for me, plus another one for the kiddo. (They're $9 each, which is one of my favourite online bargoons.) The tagline, Best served hoth, makes it even sweeter.

The Battle of Hogwarts is the name of the grand finale that plays out in the last of the Harry Potter books, and it looks like the film adaptation will try hard to live up to readers' imaginations. The tag line - It All Ends Here - combined with a apocalyptic, painting-like scene of destruction, is clever.

Here's the trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (Movie event of a generation? Did the Harry Potter series really have to pull out that kind of hyperbole?)

This is a trailer for the upcoming fourth season of Mad Men, which has been notably stingy with advance word from what to expect from Don Draper and his colleagues, post-corporate rebellion (as seen in the excellent finale to season three).

The trailer, curiously, doesn't give a single thing away about what to expect in the coming year. In fact, it's a rant Don presents to a stubborn client in one of the episodes from the first season!

Sunday, July 18, 2010

When I was a kid, I was a bit of a bit of a comic-book junkie, and Green Lantern was one of my favourites ... even though the whole bit was kind of preposterous. (So, let's see: you stick a ring in a lantern, and then you can fly with it, and make anything you want out of its rays? OK!)

With the superhero boom at the movies continuing on and on, it was inevitable that GL would get his turn, too. Above is an Entertainment Weekly cover hyping the forthcoming Ryan Reynolds movie, which is a full year away. My favourite line in the piece is from Reynolds, describing the sensation of being flung through the air to simulate flight:

"The first time you do it, you’re seriously considering an adult diaper," Reynolds says.

We went to see a movie at the Avalon Mall last night, and parked at the lot off Thorburn Road - the one with the pedestrian overpass across O'Leary. Here's what we saw when we approached the lot:

Yep, someone had conveniently parked their Honda Civic right in the main entrance to the north end of the lot.

And they didn't just park illegally ... they did so with style. This shot show how perpendicular parking leaves not a whole lot of room for everyone else to get by:

You can see from both shots that there were plenty of other vacant spaces on the lot, at least when we got there around 6. Perhaps it was possible that the driver of this car had come for the massively popular retro car show over at Hickman's on Kenmount Road, earlier in the day (the crowds were so heavy that a chunk of Kenmount had to be closed), and wound up parking here. Still, this takes the cake for not thinking about others.

Alternatively, perhaps the person parked the car in the space behind it ... and left it in neutral, and it just slid there.

Al Green may be 64, but he still has a prime voice. On Friday night, BBC Canada aired an episode (one of the last) of the Jonathan Ross Show, which aired in the UK in June. Al Green was one of the night's guest, and later played a signature hit, Let's Stay Together, with a band that included Pink Floyd's David Gilmour on guitar, Jools Holland on piano, and another former Squeeze member, Gilson Lavis on drums. Not shabby for a house band!

A Family Guy episode in May (the 150th, incidentally) included a few musical numbers, and a spoof or two. As Brian put it, "One thing we like to do at Family Guy is make fun of pop culture, by twisting it and mocking it and commenting on it." As Stewie added, "Yeah, and some times we just steal stuff and put our characters in it."

Then came a replica of Peter Griffin mimicking the jazzy pantomime of Jerry Lewis in The Errand Boy, set to Count Basie.

Here's a side-by-side comparison that shows Stewie definitely had a point.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Can you imagine what their faculty meetings are like? (I mean, I've heard some doozy MUNFA stories over the years, but imagine having Q's issues: dealing with Tony Stark's ego, Dr. Strangelove's insanity and Anton Chigurh's pressurized gear.

My Instagram feed

Why Dot Dot Dot?

That is, where did this blog get its name?

Dot Dot Dot is Morse code for the letter 'S,' the full message Guglielmo Marconi claimed to have received atop Signal Hill in St. John's in 1901. It ushered in the age of telecommunications. My maternal grandfather worked as a telegraph operator for Canadian Marconi on Signal Hill for many years.
As well, I have a habit of overusing the ellipsis when I write ... as frequent readers might notice.